How They Find Lost Luggage
So I got a call from Jesse. Jesse is my buddy. Jesse is from the US Airways baggage retrieval unit; ex-Navy Seals, an elite unit of highly trained individuals whose sole purpose in life is to retrieve lost luggage and to lull angry customers into a false sense of security.
Jesse said that they found my bag in Frankfurt and they are overnighting it to my place. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sort of hopeful and feeling bloggy.
Here are some tips regarding lost luggage that I picked up through this tiny adventure:
As you stand at the baggage carousel, the last of your co-passengers has long since left the airport and the only thing circling around and around is that one cardboard box addressed to a Syrian family of chicken farmers you realize that your bag is not coming anymore.
You will turn towards the desk that claims to be concerned with luggage, be it oversized or lost.
You will address the clerk sitting there (if you're lucky) with the desperate look of a person who knows that he is now at the mercy of a mechanical, de-humanized corporate machine. You will start addressing this person knowing what can go wrong in the insanely complex process of inter-continental travel, random TSA security checks and the absolute certainty that the vast majority of staff of any company is incompetent by default.
You will file a lost luggage report. You will be given a reference number. You will be reassured that luggage usually turns up within 24 hours. Except when it doesn't.
So it doesn't. What happens now?
Well, in most cases bags get "lost" when airport luggage handlers grab bags by their tags (the white stickers that were applied to it when checking it in) and in the process, rip them off.
So for these "lost tags" kinds of luggage each individual bag will be opened by the airport personnel. They are instructed to look inside and find the most striking object(s) they can see and then enter the general characteristics of your bag (color, make, type) + a description of aforementioned objects into a database.
At the same time, the report you gave of your suitcase is also entered into the same computer system. If he was doing his job right, the clerk will have asked you to describe 1 or more items in your suitcase that are especially remarkable.
Every day the computer will run searches on the database: it will perform a certain kind of fuzzy matching of all lost items against all found items. It will track potential matches in a queue which will be reviewed by luggage retrieval personnel. If they think it is a real match they will actually call the airport where your potential bag was found and ask the person at the other end to open it to verify that you are indeed talking about the same thing. If this result is positive: congratulations, your bag has been found.
Note that the above mentioned process can only work when the original clerk that took your lost luggage report actually correctly entered your information in the computer and if you have something more distinct than black socks in your suitcase.
Since it turns out that the one who entered my original case file may not actually have been literate, I can only advise to immediately call the actual luggage retrieval service and have them verify every piece of information in the database and if necessary to have them correct it.
TL;DR: always travel with a pink dildo in your suitcase.
